Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Thanks especially to Cardoe and everyone behind gentooexperimental.org, at some point this week (hopefully tomorrow, but no guarantees) I’ll be moving the PHP Overlay from its current home to the new site php.portage-overlays.org.

I’m really grateful that we’ve been able to get portage-overlays.org up and running. I’m personally hoping we can make portage-overlays.org a hub for as many overlays as possible. I’m especially interested in using overlays as a home for packages and ebuilds that are sat in bugzilla with no dev willing (or available) to add them to the official Portage tree. F.ex, I already have a local Xen overlay (built largely from the ebuilds in bugzilla). I don’t have the time to add Xen to Portage, and certainly not to support it, but it doesn’t take much time to setup an overlay, and then oversee access from committed parties. If the experience w/ the PHP overlay is anything to go by, we should attract some excellent people who we can then do our best to recruit

Using a wiki such as trac to go alongside the subversion overlay also allows docs to get written and published (and polished) very quickly, and hopefully will come to provide a good source of material for the GDP to base their guides on. It gives us an opportunity to get more people involved, and to make it easier for them to get involved. And it’s not just from people editing the wiki pages. The AddComment macro for Trac allows any user to add comments to a page. This is how the PHP Manual has operated for years, and I’m a firm believer that it’s one of the key reasons why the PHP Manual is as good as it is today. It keeps feedback and further information about a topic as close to the original material as possible - by putting it on the same page.